I recently graduated (class of '25), and the thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.

There's a great student op-ed about _a_ proposed solution (firing the deans): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...

• DesaiAshu

  today at 5:44 PM

  Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club)

  It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very heavy paycuts to remain in academia, but the result of that finger pointing is devaluing education

  The right approach - in my eyes - is to share the land Harvard, Stanford, et. al. sit on with 10x the number of students. This simultaneously increases efficiency of the entire P&L while providing a higher quality of education to everyone

  As we've seen with the UC system (and the excellence of IITs + Chinese research universities), high density education can be synonymous with top tier research outcomes - Ivory Towers are not needed

  • 141205

    today at 8:42 PM

    Am I misunderstanding your post?: you're implying that HYPSM increase their matriculation by ten times? These "elite" colleges,—one of which I've attended for graduate school,—have serious issues already with becoming degree mills; degrees have depreciated enormously in value over the last several decades: consider the collapse in being able to find a tenure track research position, even from one of these colleges. If we wanted elite colleges to provide the benefits that they are supposed to; then we would, if anything, want to reduce matriculation.

    Stanford,—and I would hazard a guess many other HYPSM schools,—are already minting out too many students; this is especially true when it comes to non-PHD masters degrees, which are essentially an unbecoming cash cow for departments. Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours; increasing matriculation would only lead to more auditorium-sized classes that are run by lecturers or postdocs—these classes are essentially at the same level as trudging through online material.

    Your proposed "solution" would have a Procrustean effect: I can't speak for Chinese or Indian universities, but while schools like UC Berkeley, UT Austin, University of Michigan, et seq... have good reputations, they have a noticeably lower reputation than the ivy leagues and certain private colleges like Stanford, MIT, and Caltech—and a worse reputation for being degree mills.

    If you think that Stanford having 180,000 students matriculated will give everyone a quality education, then I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality. The only benefit that would come of it would be popping the degree bubble and prematurely ending the current moribund trajectory that universities are on; where they are already treating degrees as if they were artificial-scarcity NFTs, rather than providing the actual scarcity that is access to,—and direct training from,—high-level researchers.

    • nablaxcroissant

      today at 9:42 PM

      Pretty much agree but may I also add that Santa Clara County would probably not allow Stanford to increase its student body by any real sizeable amount due to restrictions in traffic, building, parking, etc, etc.

  • impendia

    today at 6:09 PM

    I got curious, and looked up the Harvard Polo Club. Apparently it naturally faded away as polo declined in popularity, but then was revived in 2006.

    I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off.

    But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?

    • PaulHoule

      today at 6:27 PM

      Probably they got a donation.

      I used to have a view of a baseball field out my office window until they rolled up the astroturf to start construction of the new computing and information science building.

      They got some money to build a really nice fan-friendly facility off-campus. Still the thing about baseball is that the season is early in the year and starts before the weather is comfortable for home games so they spend the first half of the season going to away games down south, far enough away that they're probably buying airline tickets instead of riding the bus the way that Ivy League (or ECAC) teams usually ride the bus to go to other Ivy League (or ECAC) schools.

      If it wasn't for Lacrosse we wouldn't have anybody using our football stadium in the spring and hey, Lacrosse is both a men's and women's sport. (At Cornell we're lucky enough to have two football teams to keep it busy in the Fall)

      Critics would say that Lacrosse is a boon to rich students since poor students don't go to high schools that have Lacrosse and it largely escapes the notice of the marginalization-industrial complex because those folks are aware that there is an industry in SAT test prep and not so aware that there is Lacrosse.

  • nyeah

    today at 6:16 PM

    How old is typical university land, compared to the average age of land in the same city?

    • georgeecollins

      today at 6:51 PM

      I know you are making a joke, but for people who may not understand: The point is that well regarded Universities in the USA are generally old relative to other institutions in the USA. So Stanford has a pretty campus on land that was purchased when hardly anyone lived in Palo Alto. Now that land is absurdly valuable.

      As in the article, it changes how you might use the land. A grove is a beautiful place to go and read or relax. But if you could replace that grove with a structure worth of hundreds of millions of dollars it changes things.

• bonsai_spool

  today at 6:04 PM

  > The thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.

  I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.

  • rd

    today at 6:20 PM

    This is true! I hadn't thought about it like this to be totally honest. It's hard to point fingers at old institutions, especially given they're mostly located in prime real estate locations across the country (Cambridge, Palo Alto, etc.), and it's not really their fault that they need land to operate.

• neutronicus

  today at 5:37 PM

  That's a common sentiment among non-Hopkins Baltimoreans.

  It's a small city, so a lot of people have experiences with real estate held by Hopkins.

> He remembers when that building came up, back in 2001, replacing a grove of elm, beech, and oak trees on campus. The old arts center hadn’t been cheap: $17 million was real money at the turn of the millennium.

They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. There are many "temporary" Quonset huts around here twice that age. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.

• bpt3

  today at 8:25 PM

  As the article states, the funds came from an external donor.

  It's not how I would choose to use $250M+ of my money, but it appears to have nothing at all to do with federal funding (nor would it even if the building was financed by the school, but especially not in this case).

  • momoschili

    today at 9:52 PM

    The federal funds pay for it through the indirect costs funding its maintenance most likely... I suspect that represents a significant portion of the total cost of the building.

A wise man once told me that a company or organization has enough professors or high level academics they must also run the show. They won't like it but they have to. You shouldn't have a layer above and pretend they know better. They will inflate the importance of stuff they can understand and ignore everything important.

Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either.

"Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related.

I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.

• godelski

  today at 8:50 PM

  The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that the private sector would give them.

  But that deal has also shifted. Duties have changed and often many of the academics do not get to do much research, instead being managers of grad students who do the research. Being a professor is a lot of work and it is a lot of bureaucratic work.

  I'm not sure why you're complaining about researchers. Think about the system for a second. We've trained people for years to be researchers and then... make them managers. Imagine teaching people to program, then once you've decided they're fully trained and good programmers we say "you're free to do all the programming you want! But you have to also teach more programmers, grade their work, create their assignments and tests, mentor the advanced programmers, help them write papers, help them navigate the university system, write grants to ensure you have money for those advanced programmers, help manage your department's organization, and much more." This is even more true for early career academics who don't have tenure[0]. For the majority of professors the time they have to continue doing research (the thing which they elected to train to do! That they spent years honing! That they paid and/or gave up lots of money for!) is nights and weekends. And that's a maybe since the above tasks usually don't fit in a 40hr work week. My manager at a big tech company gets more time to do real programming work than my advisor did during my PhD.

  I'd also mention that research has a lot of monetary value. I'm not sure why this is even questioned by some people. Research lays the foundation for all the rest. Sure, a lot of it fails, but is that surprising when you're trying to push the bounds of human knowledge? Yet it is far worth it because there are singular discoveries/inventions that create more economic value than decades worth of the current global economy. It's not hard to recognize that since basically the entire economy is standing on that foundation...

  [0] Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you don't have a lab full of graduate students who need to graduate.

• statskier

  today at 6:30 PM

  I think that's the whole point. Many university's very nature has shifted significantly and lots of people don't like it and lament the change.

• bpt3

  today at 8:26 PM

  Professors at schools like this do not view these places as about teaching students. Academics, to include performing research in their field and publishing the results, yes, and the students get in the way of that.

  • Windchaser

    today at 9:17 PM

    Yes. If you want a really high quality education, you don't go to a big research school. You go to a small school, like a liberal arts school, where the teachers are both highly trained and really passionate about teaching.

    I went to a small liberal arts school for an undergrad degree in STEM, and to a R1 research university for graduate work.

    The absolute best classes at the big-name research university were about as good as the average class at my small undergrad. The classes at the small school were of distinctly better quality: more engaged teachers, more engaging work, and simply higher quality teaching.

    • bpt3

      today at 9:51 PM

      Did you go to an elite (or close to it) liberal arts school? I have gone to only R1 schools myself, but my exposure to liberal arts schools would indicate they are a mixed bag, especially in the sciences (not disagreeing with you or saying that R1 schools aren't also a mixed bag in some/many senses).

      Most undergraduates don't realize it, but the purpose of going to an R1 is access to an alumni network and (for the small percentage that are interested) access to people performing cutting edge research in a discipline and their physical resources.

      I suspect that honesty in their marketing materials would not increase applications though.

• vonneumannstan

  today at 6:38 PM

  This is probably true since at least WW2 but isn't the central idea that Professors closest to cutting edge research can do the most interesting teaching?

  If you want the best teachers you can always go to Liberal Arts Colleges where this isn't really an issue.

• gowld

  today at 6:34 PM

  R1 Research University.

  Teaching mostly by TA, not Faculty.

  Not a "college".

  • warkdarrior

    today at 6:46 PM

    TAs soon to be replaced by AI.

• nephihaha

  today at 6:23 PM

  Johns Hopkins gets a lot of money from vested interests to push whatever suits them.

  • CaptWillard

    today at 7:21 PM

    The early nod to Agora Institute mission of “building stronger global democracy” Followed by bemoaning USAID cuts makes me wonder if the author is deliberately missing one of the most glaring examples of this.

  • cucumber3732842

    today at 6:44 PM

    Exactly.

    The author's electricity bill went up and his cat got stolen in part because his colleagues working under the university incentive systems (i.e. don't publish stuff that pisses off the interests that fund your lab) created work that legitimized those policy decisions so that those decisions could be made and the funding interests, whatever they may be, could benefit from them.

    One wonders if there are similar incentives in the university ranking, administration and consulting that legitimize the university's otherwise questionable decision to engage in these seemingly irresponsible ventures.

  • irishcoffee

    today at 7:35 PM

    s/gets/accepts

    Nobody is waterboarding the money down their throat. They can say no. The actual question is: why don't they?

    • bpt3

      today at 8:27 PM

      Why would they not accept money to do something they are interested in doing?

      What is the downside to the school of a nicer student union or a public policy/international relations campus in the nation's capital?

If you’ve ever read science fiction about life in the ruins of an advanced culture, but you were irritated with how it skimmed over what the process of the fall was like— well, we sure have a wealth of those details now.

• Insanity

  today at 5:11 PM

  'advanced culture' is in the eye of the beholder. At the time, Rome was an advanced culture and we have a bunch of details of their fall.

  Not to take away from your point - I agree and the current fall makes it more tangible.

  • PaulHoule

    today at 5:39 PM

    The fall of Rome also took centuries, historians can't even agree on exactly when it began.

    • Insanity

      today at 6:18 PM

      True for the empire, not true for the republic (which still took decades but not centuries)

      • RGamma

        today at 7:21 PM

        When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)

        • PaulHoule

          today at 9:07 PM

          1970 or so. There is this version of it

          https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

          Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.

        • Windchaser

          today at 9:23 PM

          Kinda hard to pin down a date.

          When I think of the current social and political trends, I'm reminded of Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism in 1980. Or Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", published in *1963*.

          These things aren't new. They just wax and wane in power, over time, and recombine in new and interesting ways to yield long-term trends.

    • nephihaha

      today at 6:26 PM

      In the case of Rome, it depends how you define "fall". There were certainly some military setbacks and also some bad climatic conditions (which affected central America and China around the same time.) Probably better to say that Rome was in decline for a long time.

    • cindyllm

      today at 7:48 PM

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• tsumnia

  today at 6:50 PM

  I like Discworld's take on "advanced culture" - Ankh-Morpork is simple built on top of the skeletons of the original city multiple times over.

When I was at university, my institution was investing $millions in building various new building. A grumbled to my supervisor, who explained to me that this was important to attracting new students.

It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.

• neilv

  today at 6:33 PM

  I liked MIT's "building 20" cluster of wooden shacks, which were featured prominently in the east side of campus. It was said that, when an experiment needed more space, people would casually punch a hole in a wall.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20

  Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center

• Tangurena2

  today at 6:08 PM

  I blame the "contest" started by the magazine US News and World Report, which started their college rating. This led to university execs aiming to raise their rating at the expense of education. Higher rankings meant higher bonuses for top employees - especially the president of the university. This race for ratings is why the cost of a university education has skyrocketed far faster than inflation.

  • Loughla

    today at 8:34 PM

    I am not aware of any college that uses reports like US News and World Report rankings in the compensation packages of their executives.

    I agree with your main point, but see a different cause, though. The problem is that parents and students use these reports as a bellwether for identifying prospective schools. Campus visits (short visits) where you see what the campus looks like, but don't actually learn what its about is the second problem.

    There is too much PR and not enough focus on substance in higher education, just like there is in many, many, many areas of life in the United States today.

Beautiful essay. Such quiet scathing critique. Written from the POV of a history professor witness:

> The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza.

These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...

• kittikitti

  today at 8:50 PM

  I also found that quote to be great. I'm starting to read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom so this is an apt comparison. Thanks.

Johns Hopkins has a business school, the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which was peculiarly not mentioned in the essay. You'd think their own business school would be capable of bringing fiscal sanity to the university?

• nyeah

  today at 6:22 PM

  Business school professors are professors. They've never run any business. They can train MBA students to get hired and promoted. They can keep their own personal money in S&P500 index funds. That's about it.

  (EDIT: Even if a few B-school professors have real-world business management skills, why would the university listen to them? They're just employees, and they're not nearly expensive enough to be credible.)

  • WalterBright

    today at 6:31 PM

    I'm reminded of "Back to School" where Rodney Dangerfield explained to the business professor how business really works.

  • georgeecollins

    today at 6:55 PM

    This is so true! At best business school professors have a side hustle consulting. And you can read in many places about the perils and questionable efficacy of consultants.

    What they are-- first foremost-- is academics and fad surfers.

• bpt3

  today at 8:29 PM

  What is the fiscal insanity of taking money from someone and spending it for your benefit (with some strings attached, which are usually minor)?

I miss the Newseum, not least because it had this exhibit:

https://www.motorious.com/articles/highlights/don-bolles-car...

• RGamma

  today at 7:32 PM

  Journalists were asking for the bombed car of journalist Jon Bolles to be removed? Murdered while he was defending the public interest against the mafia?

  Standards seem to be falling everywhere...

• xhkkffbf

  today at 5:53 PM

  I liked the Newseum too, if only for the daily newspaper front pages available out front each day. Those were amazing.

  But it had the same problem. They spent a fortune on the physical plant and never had the foot traffic to justify it.

  • mandevil

    today at 6:07 PM

    As someone who volunteered in a museum right near the Newseum, their biggest problem was the competition. The Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art being some of the best museums in the world, right across the street, with much better stuff and totally free was always going to be hard to compete with. The only private museum that has managed to survive is the International Spy Museum, which went all in on fun and interactives, and much less on education, and has a lot less prestigious footprint.

"Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. The new fixed costs cannibalize existing funding streams, increasing pressure to grow revenue."

• vlz

  today at 5:26 PM

  'He remembers the quip from a former dean: “The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.”'

  • PaulHoule

    today at 5:51 PM

    I was working in digital libraries circa 2005 and we had that bubble pop when people understood the business model was "get a $100,000 grant and spend $20,000 a year maintaining the product in perpetuity." I tried to convince management that if these were part of a system designed for maintenance in mind we could get that $20,000 to $500-$2000 a year, but it seemed the institutional response to this situation was "let go of the most productive people and keep the least."

It is just part of the establishment. When the establishment withered it withered with it. It’s just a symptom of a larger, deeper problem.

• mandevil

  today at 6:02 PM

  Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland lines are the perfect metaphor for what has happened to American society.

  From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else.

  And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.

  • Nicook

    today at 6:28 PM

    The third worldization of the USA continues at pace. Expensive reasonable enclaves for the rich, nothing for the rest.

  • scuff3d

    today at 6:28 PM

    The community college I went to was doing this same crap. I remember going to the opening of a new arts building that provided less usable space then the building it replaced, and sitting around with all the donors and school administration paying themselves on the back. Meanwhile they didn't have enough room for most of the departments, and the tutoring programs were getting slashed.

  • markus_zhang

    today at 8:24 PM

    Yeah I can see this enshitification occurs everywhere, not just in Disney land. It is sad. But at the same time it gives me some reflection about my choice of entertainment -- like, do I really need those things? Do I really need Netflix/Youtube/etc. that badly? Should I sit down with my kid, before an offline computer and a paper manual, and program in QBASIC together, or run some typing games altogether, just for fun?

This is all stuff I feel like I was basically aware of but when it's described together it's so... depressing. Ugh.

I misread the title as "The Missuses of the University" and thought this might be the next iteration on the "Real Housewives" franchise: "Real Housewives of the University".

Sorry, didn't mean to distract from the serious topic at hand.

• amarant

  today at 5:54 PM

  Glad I'm not the only one on here who is apparently illiterate: I did the exact same misread!

"Limp signs on the fencing announce the opening of the SNF Agora Institute, by which, he’s informed, the university is “building stronger global democracy."

"In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..."

Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas.

What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?

> With its 29 cantilevered roof planes and its clerestory glazed windows, it will quickly become the highlight of campus tours. Prospective students will look on with envy. Maybe it will attract more applicants.

I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top.

Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.

• busyant

  today at 6:55 PM

  my youngest son visited a handful of "fancy" schools near the end of highschool and he thought the whole process was nuts.

  he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."

• wrqvrwvq

  today at 6:43 PM

  Modern uni has a strong cruise-ship aesthetic.

  • sevensor

    today at 8:17 PM

    I live in a college town. There are now commercial bar crawl operators. They make the T shirt, develop an itinerary, coordinate with the bars. It’s a weirdly infantilized form of debauchery. Can’t frat boys be trusted to make bad decisions on the spur of the moment any more?

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